Submitting to the OSEHRA Technical Journal

Substantial code contributions such as new VistA modules or major refactorings of the existing code base require a submission to the OSEHRA Technical Journal (OTJ). OTJ submissions allow for a more thorough description of the submitted code; allow community members to download, use, try, and maintain the submitted code prior to and independently of its eventual inclusion into the OSEHRA code base; and allow for persistence of the submission.

To submit code to the OSEHRA Technical Journal, first obtain the OSEHRA M-Code Primary Developers Checklist or from the OTJ site. The OSEHRA M-Code Primary Developers Checklist provides a set of steps, procedures and documentation requirements that should form part of any submission. As each step of the checklist is met, mark it as complete and save the document. Along with developing the code, also generate a set of automated tests that execute using the OSEHRA Code Testing framework, a description of any additional functional tests that should be carried out manually to fully test the system, and a Technical Article that describes the functional goals of the system, the use of the system and any additional details that may help a user of the package and for the subsequent developers who will maintain the package. Technical Articles are expected to follow the style of a technical report, with particular focus on providing guidance for the future use and maintenance of the new code contribution.

Use an archival tool (for example, zip or tar.zip) to generate several contribution packets consisting of:

When combined with the Technical Article, this results in four files that need to be prepared. Once the submission is ready, go to the OTJ and click on "New Publication" as shown in Figure 2. The submission process will walk through the required steps of the submission including:

Choosing a submission target

Agreeing to the open source license

Filling in the contact and general information of the submission

Uploading the:

Technical Article

Source Code

Test Code

Data

OSEHRA M-Code Primary Developers Checklist and supporting documents

An optional developer specific logo

At the end of the process the article and code is uploaded to the OTJ and becomes available for download, review, comments and eventual inclusion into the OSEHRA code base.